Last week, I was up in London visiting a client when I heard that another project of ours was to be launched shortly. It was part of a project we've been working on for just over three years: the global design language for Al Jazeera Network digital, with the first two products being launched in Turkey and a beta of the Arabic news channel.

There is so much to talk about on a project of this scale. Here are just a few highlights:

Spending time with journalists and the newsroom to understand how news is reported.

Working with Al Jazeera during the Arab Spring; from the uprising in Egypt to Libya.

Course-correcting throughout the project. Responsive Design wasn't really a thing three years ago.

Designing in four languages – Arabic, English, Turkish and Slavic – when the MBD team primarily speaks one.

Adopting an Object Oriented approach from content through to code. Modular, transferrable and scalable. It required a level of detailed thought right down to how content types were defined in the CMS.

Working with three development partners across three independent content management systems.

I could go on and on. And I probably will at some point. Needless to say, none of the above could achieved without a patient, smart and agile client-side team. Good job the Al Jazeera team are just that.

There are many buzz words you could label this project with: content-first, responsive, atomic, OOCSS. Again, I could go on. But the one thing that was first, central and always through prototyping and early strategy was good research. It was a research-first project. That probably won't come as a surprise to some of you given we have our own in-house researcher, Emma. What may come as a surprise, however, is the degree in which that early research led approach laid the foundation for a fundamental shift in how Al Jazeera thought about their content.

Content shelf-life.

Many news journalists think of their content as a few distinct types:

Rolling news: Typically taken straight from the wire and edited over time to fit the growing needs of the story.

Editorial: Longer form piece. Still highly topical and timely.

Op-ed: Opinion piece from a named author.

Feature: A story. With a beginning, a middle and an end. Long-form content, and not necessarily timely.

These can all be mapped to timeliness; both in terms of how long they take to create and their editorial time-life. The more timely a piece, the shorter it takes to create and the shorter the shelf-life.

Rolling news: timely, short shelf-life.

Editorial: timely, long-form, short to mid shelf-life.

Op-ed: Long-form, mid shelf-life.

feature: Long-form, long shelf-life.

Publication schedules are often focussed around this creation with journalists having several pieces of the different types in various degrees of completion to various deadlines focussed on different stories. This is a comfortable mental model, one that newspapers have been arranged around for decades. But it isn't necessarily how users of websites look for content. Users will not typically look for a type of content, but will look for a context of a story first: the topic.

The new information architecture of the Al Jazeera platform has been built around a topic-first approach. But also, the modular content and design allows for the rapid changing of display of the news as a topic or news story moves through the various content types. It's a design system, connected to a CMS that accommodates what news naturally does. It changes.

The Design System

The whole platform is built on top of Gridset using modular design principles. The content is modular and multifaceted, designed for re-use, as is the design. For years now at Mark Boulton Design, we've not designed websites, but an underpinning design system with naming conventions, rules, patterns. This is particularly useful when many CMS software thinks of content objects in this way. Our systematic thinking can applied all the way through CMS integration. Software engineers love designers giving them rules.

It's funny, we seem to have just discovered this in web design, but many other design disciplines have been approaching their work in this way for decades. Some for centuries. Take typography, for example. The design process of creating a typographic design is systematic thinking at its purest. Designing heading hierarchies and the constituent parts of written language can be approached in an abstracted way. This is exactly the right approach when designing for other languages.

Arabic has obvious challenges for an English-speaker. Not only is it written right to left, but the glyphs are non-roman. To approach this as a English-speaker, we needed to create tools and process to help. Words no longer look like words, but shapes of words. Page designs no longer look like familiar blocks of text, type hierarchy and colour. We saw form more than we saw function.

Just the start

Three years is a long time to work on a project. I'm so delighted to finally see the design system in the wild. For such a long time, we only saw it in prototype form, but you can only take prototypes so far. We needed to pressure-test content types, see where it breaks, adjust a hundred and one small details to make it work. All of this just underpins the fact that now the system is being rolled out, there needs to be changes made every day to evolve the system. This is the web after-all. It's a feature, not a bug.